Social Question

Do you think time travel will be possible in the future?

There are mixed opinions about this matter. Some say it is possible, other say it isn’t.

The argument in favor for it suggests that with the advance of technology, people can do incredible things. Beside, scientists seem to have discovered that all periods of time are connected by some kind of very small “tunnels”, we only need to widen the tunnels to the size of human.
The argument against it states that time travel is next to impossible since it will be against the Quantum mechanics (I don’t know what Quantum mechanics is, but an easier explanation for it is that if a man travels to the past and kill his father, then he will not be born, and there will be no time travel thing. But the time travel does happen, so he cannot kill his father, meaning all the above-mentioned process is impossible to happen).

I don’t think time travel in that sense will happen, but I was reading A Brief History of Time and it talked something about finding a wormhole which allows you to get to a place faster than you could have gotten there normally. So that is technically “time travel”. But I don’t know what properties make up a wormhole and if they can exist. I’m no expert; I was just curiously reading Hawking at the library since The God Delusion was misplaced. It was pretty interesting, though.

Some have hypothesised that if one can time-travel, then they can only travel to the point at which the wormhole was originally opened. That would explain why we haven’t seen anyone from the future back here. We simply haven’t invented time travel yet.

Consider planetary movement. We aren’t just orbiting the Sun, we are also orbiting the center of the Galaxy. You would need to travel backwards, yet stay locked onto your location. The only safe place to do that would be in space, which would require the ability to travel great distances to make up for the distance traveled.
Ain’t gonna happen.

@Mimishu1995 , There is a way around the father killing paradox that you mention. See here The article is kind of long, so here is the condensed version. One interpretation of quantum mechanics is that instead of interpreting it probabilistically, assume that each possibility results in an entirely different universe. In that way, killing your father spins off into a totally different universe from the one in which you did not travel back in time.

@ragingloli , By your interpretation, time travel would be impossible, because even the slightest molecular level change to the past will eventually cause noticeable change by the butterfly effect. In other words, by merely going back to the past and breathing, the future will be modified.

No, my version is that any time travel to the past, and any actions you might do once you arrive, are already part of history before you start your travel.
To stay with the grandfather example, when you travel to the past, your presence in that past already was part of the past of the timeline that you left, and you will fail to kill your grandfather, because your failure to kill your grandfather is already part of your timeline’s history.

Hello, I am a present-day Vulcan. While our evolutionary history is similar to you Terrans, we learned from our first major war that murder and racism are not positive attributes, and discovered spaceflight while you were nailing illiterate Jewish men to crosses.

It would be cool, but impossible. To believe that, you would have to believe that a zillion of you exist, all hooked together in a row, like a slinky, stretching from birth to death. Besides, if it were possible, someone from the past or future would have come to visit by now.

@Kropotkin If you are really from the future, why don’t you just help us instead of standing there laughing? We’re your ancestors you know.

@Blondesjon If the future exists, why not the past? Imagine the people in the future have the same thought as you and when you travel to the future, they say: “You belong to the past, which isn’t exist anymore. That means you aren’t exist, so why are you here?” What will your reaction be?

@RealEyesRealizeRealLies If that time machine can only travel to the future, how are its users supposed to travel back to their starting time period after traveling to the future. Will they be stuck in the future forever?